The Gay Affair
The Claudine Gay affair follows a familiar script. Principles and values associated with racism, the boilerplate litany of phobias linked to religion, ethnicity, and genders, varieties of predation, and in Gay’s case scholarship and academic misconduct, are cynically weaponized to bring down ideological foes. Individuals on the same side of the chasm as the accused mount kneejerk defenses in the face of evidence that there is substance to the allegation. Others react by denouncing the accused while acknowledging the bad faith of the accusers.
Experts abound. They come down on both sides in the Gay affair. Differing views about just what constitutes plagiarism and distinctions between honest mistakes and severe academic misconduct are obscured in the smoke and fog of polemical warfare. Everything is black and white, the default judgements innocent, pure as driven snow, or guilty, guilty, guilty!
Claudine Gay came under fire after her encounter with Elise Stefanik, about which I wrote in Fog Around Speech and Moral Clarity. I remain baffled by her failure, and that of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and MIT, to come better prepared for a line of questioning that should have been anticipated. At the time I expressed hope that Gay and Sally Kornbluth at MIT would resist pressure to resign and that their institutions would stand by them (Liz Magill had already resigned as president at Penn). Perhaps they could play a part in authentic reflection and debate about speech, its appropriate limits, and when institutions are permitted, even obliged, to place restrictions on it. That is not going to happen with Gay toppled and Kornbluth next on the hit list.
Allegations of plagiarism had been floating around for a while but did not gain traction until they were aired by Christopher Rufo and Christoper Brunet on December 10 (Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist?) and followed up the next day by an article in the Washington Free Beacon (Sibarium, 'This is Definitely Plagiarism'). Calls for Gay to step down or be forced out came from all corners, including responsible, respected sources such as conservative scholar and former professor Tom Nichols and liberal Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus as well as the likes of Rufo and Stefanik who wielded their accusations in the service of a cultural and political agenda. She might have been able to weather one storm, the Stefanik debacle or the plagiarism allegations, but not both. There was no way she could continue to serve as Harvard’s president.
There appears to be general agreement that Gay violated Harvard policies on plagiarism, at least in a narrow, technical sense, and possibly more grievously. There is though considerable difference of opinion about the gravity of Gay’s offenses. Nichols takes a hard line and no prisoners: “Claudine Gay engaged in academic misconduct. Everything else about her case is irrelevant, including the silly claims of her right-wing opponents.” He cites new charges about her work that “include episodes of what most scholars would recognize as academic misconduct, including plagiarism” and experts consulted by CNN “who consider the recent excerpts to be plagiarism,” with which he agrees. “None of this,” he writes, “excuses the general awfulness of people [Stefanik, Rufo] who have reveled in Gay’s problems,” but even allowing for the possibility that some of Gay’s transgressions are minor, forgetting “to attribute a source or place a footnote,” there is a pattern that is “too damning to ignore and transcends excuses about sloppiness or accidents” (Nichols, Claudine Gay’s resignation).
Nichols fails to note that Jonathan Bailey, “a plagiarism and copyright expert” who told CNN that Gay’s resignation was “likely the best thing she could do for her and the school,” also said that “while another researcher with a similar pattern of issues would likely not be forced to resign or face termination, she is both the president of Harvard and the center of a very politically charged story. Her situation is unique” (Egan, Harvard President).
Beth McMurtrie at The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed three scholars who study and write about academic ethics to discuss how colleges handle plagiarism cases:
Susan D. Blum, an anthropology professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture; Sarah Elaine Eaton, an associate professor of education at the University of Calgary, whose research focuses on academic ethics in higher education; and Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California at San Diego, whose research focuses on ethics and integrity in education. (A Brief Guide)
She reported that there is considerable variation in how colleges deal with accusations of faculty plagiarism and how results are reported. Students and faculty are treated differently “because,” said Bertram Gallant, “there is more infrastructure in place to handle academic-integrity allegations against students. So there is more consistency, student to student, in outcomes.” Eaton told McMurtrie it is hard to track faculty cases unless they become news stories.
“Data is usually only limited to students. I have yet to see a research-integrity report from any university that discloses misconduct from researchers or professors,” she said, adding that “most universities would be reluctant to produce such a report on the grounds that it might cause reputational damage.”
McMurtrie writes that “Research has shown that academics often can’t agree on how to define plagiarism and how to measure its severity.”
Eaton once did a policy analysis of 20 Canadian universities’ definitions of plagiarism and could not find consistency. “The difference between intentional plagiarism and sloppy scholarship, I think, is one of the greatest debates in the plagiarism world.”
The experts note, too, that answers often vary by discipline. What might be acceptable repetition of a common definition or description in one field might be frowned upon in another.
David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, disputes the Washington Free Beacon’s contention that Gay plagiarized his work in an article. Canon told Andrew Lawrence at The Guardian he was “not at all concerned about the passages. This isn't even close to an example of academic plagiarism” (Harvard’s Claudine Gay was ousted). He repeated this to CNN:
“I am not at all concerned about the passages in the Free Beacon article concerning my work. Both Dr. Gay and I are defining basic terms. Good definitions of these terms would have to use similar language or they would not be accurate. This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.” (Egan, Harvard President)
Detecting plagiarism was somewhat hit or miss before AI came on the scene to provide “an easy means to produce work that’s not one’s own, but also for educators to cross-check for plagiarism…It was through AI that the inconsistencies in Gay’s scholarship were found” (Lawrence). But AI has its limitations.
Even with the best plagiarism-ferreting tools, the answer isn’t always cut and dry. The offending passages in Gay’s dissertation acknowledgments, unoriginal as they look on first glance, could be charitably interpreted as intertextual references for a knowing audience. “If you look at the allegations,” says Bailey, “they include examples that are actually worrisome and raise serious issues. But they also include a lot of examples that are weak and meaningless.” (Lawrence)
McMurtrie’s experts voiced similar cautions. Sarah Elaine Eaton told NPR that“The software is not foolproof — it still requires human intervention" (Romo, Archie, Claudine Gay's resignation). Bertram Gallent said, “Human discernment is critical. All that these programs do is detect similarities in text. It is still up to the instructor to investigate further” (McMurtrie, A Brief Guide).
Ian Bogost describes his investigation of plagiarism-detection software in The Atlantic. According to his bio note at the magazine, where he is a contributing writer, Bogost is “director of the film- and media-studies program at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is also a computer-science and engineering professor.” He “has published 150 or so scholarly articles and conference papers, and 10 books” (The Plagiarism War Has Begun).
Jonathan Bailey told Bogost “that the analysis of Gay’s dissertation is likely to have been carried out with iThenticate, an online service run by the same company that operates the popular student-oriented plagiarism detector Turnitin.” When Bogost asked Brunet and Rufo “how they’d performed their analysis, Brunet said ‘No comment’ and Rufo didn’t answer.” Turnitin also did not respond when Bost queried them about use of iThenticate to investigate Gay’s work.
Bogost performed his own test on his 2004 dissertation downloaded from the institutional repository at UCLA. It turns out there is considerably more to the process than running the document through the software and waiting for AI’s verdict. The program came back with a score of 74.
The number describes what percentage of a document’s material is similar to text from its database of reference works. My result—my 74—suggested that three-quarters of my dissertation had been copied from other sources. “What the heck?” I said aloud, except I didn’t say “heck.”
Bailey’s explained that “iThenticate doesn’t detect plagiarism. It detects copied or similar text. You have to do a lot of manual work.” AI may find similar text published after the publication of the text being authenticated because it looks, apparently indiscriminately, forward in time as well as backward. Bogost’s own later book based on his disseration was the source of many false positives. The copy of his dissertation he uploaded on the iThenticate website was the source of others:
The institutional-archive copy of my dissertation had added a line to the footer of each page, “Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.” iThenticate had matched a dozen or more other dissertations with the same notice.
In the meantime Stefanik, Rufo, and their fellowship of jackals howl in glee. They are riding high as they celebrate the resignations of Gay and Liz Magill at the University of Pennsylvania. There is plenty to criticize about American institutions of higher learning, not least that too many serve as adjuncts to football business enterprises. The characters who took down Gay and Magill care little about antisemitism and less about scholarly rigor, academic freedom, and vigorous debate and disputation in the free exchange of ideas. This was about the personal and professional annihilation of Gay to strike a blow at the universities.
Billionaire hedge fund manager, major donor, and outspoken critic of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies Bill Ackman “became embroiled in university politics after students protested against Israel’s actions in Palestine” (Gabbatt, Media now). The tables were turned when Business Insider reported multiple instances of plagiarism in the dissertation and other papers by Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman, “a former MIT professor and celebrity within the world of academia” (Long, et al., Academic celebrity Neri Oxman). The Business Insider article is a hit job aimed at Ackman. The only possible relevance to the Gay affair is as an indication that academic mistakes and misconduct are not as rare as one would hope, a flimsy justification given the testimony of experts confirming that very fact. This tit-for-tat garbage does not serve us well.
The real scandal in the Oxman affair is that she cribbed not from other scholars or scholarly sources but, in four instances documented by Business Insider, from Wikipedia. Wikipedia. In a dissertation. Lordy, as Charlie Sykes would say. Or should that be “Lordy”?
Ackman is outraged by the attack on his wife and seeks vengeance. He announced “he is now launching a plagiarism check” of MIT president Sally Kornbluth “along with all the school’s faculty and its board members” (Wadman, Kaiser, Billionaire launches) and “appears to have expanded his scattergun attack against other perceived liberal institutions, with news organizations and the media now in his sights” (Gabbatt). Should anyone expect this to be carried out with human intervention and discernment? No. It will only unleash waves of blockheads and dingbats out to wreak havoc armed with raw, unfiltered output spewed by AI.
The more I read about plagiarism and related issues the more I felt sympathy for Claudine Gay. I began my dive into the affair already disappointed by her performance at the Stefanik hearing. I soon got the impression that she is not considered to be a distinguished scholar. Graeme Wood, yet another writer at The Atlantic, which has been all over the affair, states that “her publication record is extremely thin, and much of it contains passages cribbed from other scholars” (Harvard’s [McGeorge] Bundy Standard). This may go too far. However, he goes to make the better point that
she was likely expected to have a kind of charisma with the social-justice and racial-equity constituencies reckoned to have power on American campuses. As a Black woman who studied the political effects of race and led initiatives on race, she was supposed to be safe against accusations that Harvard did not take seriously its mission to study and correct racial issues.
This rings true. It also made her a prime target for Stefanik, Rufo, and their crowd.
Wood surmises that the person who might want the job of Harvard president would be “someone whose academic record is sterling, who has a history of speaking with poise about matters of public concern, and who does not mind being watched, closely, by the world.” He puts in a plug for Danielle Allen, “a classicist with a bulletproof résumé” who occupies the James Conant Bryant chair at Harvard. I have read opinion columns by Allen at the Washington Post, articles in The Atlantic, and her book Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, and find her as impressive at Wood does. Ah, but I digress.
I cannot speak to the quality of Gay’s academic work. On this too there appears to be a range of opinion. Wood is not alone, but not the final word either. The brief bio on the website of Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies (CAPS) (Claudine Gay bio) and two articles that appeared in university publications after she became president are predictably glowing, the sources should be considered, but they do make a case for her (Pazzanese, ‘I Love This Place’; and Rosenberg, A “Scholar’s Scholar”). Gay’s CV includes a list of fellowships, honors, publications and memberships. She began her transtion to administration in 2015 as Dean of Social Science where she served until 2018 when she became Edgerley Family Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. This appears to be where she made her mark.
A brief biographical note may be of interest though not relevant to the plagiarism issue. Gay is the daughter of Haitian immigrants, another box checked to put her in the crosshairs for the usual suspects. Her parents were professionals, her mother a registered nurse and her father a civil engineer. She spent part of her childhood in New York City and part in Saudi Arabia, where her father was stationed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After attending Phillips Exeter Academy she spent one year at Princeton before transferring to Stanford.
Plagiarism is a serious matter. But, summing up:
Research has shown that academics often can’t agree on how to define plagiarism and how to measure its severity. Where does paraphrasing end and plagiarism begin? Is leaving out a few quote marks and citations on short pieces of writing lazy authorship or intentional plagiarism? These questions roiled around Gay, but they are also everywhere in academe.
…
The experts note, too, that answers often vary by discipline. What might be acceptable repetition of a common definition or description in one field might be frowned upon in another. (McMurtrie)
Bertram Gallent told McMurtrie that “Study after study has shown, you show this group of faculty five works and there will not be agreement on whether those works contain plagiarism or not.”
Gay can be criticized for not mounting a robust against the allegation. There is little beyond acknowledgement that mistakes were made, requests for formal corrections to published works, and insistence that she never misrepresented her research findings or claimed credit for the research of others. On her behalf, I add that not once have I come across any indication that Gay’s dissertation advisers or the editors and reviewers of her published articles brought to her attention issues related to plagiarism that have recently been raised, with the caveat that, as was noted earlier, detection of plagiarism was hit or miss in the long ago days.
The issue is trivialized when instances that fall into gray areas where there is good faith disagreement are characterized as serious misconduct. What constitutes a gray area and its extent is no more settled than the rest of it. Tom Nichols, whose views I have often cited with approbation, might dispute that.
If Gay were an ordinary member of the faculty, review of the plagiarism charges and a determination would have been made through an orderly, deliberative process instead in the press and by social media mob. It is this rush to judgment that makes some scholars uncomfortable with the affair despite concerns about the more serious allegations. People of integrity and good will may disagree about whether she deserved her fate. Pipsqueaks and weasels can also be found on both sides.
Claudine Gay was not just another faculty member. As Harvard’s president, the public face of the institution, she was rightly held to a different standard. There is no way she could continue in the circumstances. Gay is also black and the child of immigrants. Race and racism animated some of her detractors, as evidenced by the racist vitriol and death threats she has received through email and phone calls (Beckett, Ousted Harvard president), but racism is only part of it. She was the instrument for an attack on the university and “a highly educated cohort…a meritocratic class…[who have] a lot of education…a lot of cultural power,” thought by David Brooks and people he describes as populists to “control the media…the universities, [and] increasingly control the courts” (Nawaz, Brooks and Capeheart). Or put more crudely, socialist, Marxist liberals. And perverts. That Gay is black, a child of immigrants, and a woman is just a bonus for those who orchestrated the campaign against her from the right flank.
I am convinced that Gay indeed violated Harvard’s policies on plagiarism but not that her transgressions are as serious as Tom Nichols and Graeme Wood think them. Whatever her merits as a scholar, she appears to be a decent, intelligent, capable woman with some genuine accomplishments. She had to go, but she deserved better treatment than she got. And she has more to offer. We should hope she gets the opportunity.
I imagine there are precious few humans who do not have something, somewhere in the past that could be ferreted out, embellished if need be, and weaponized for use against them. If nothing can found, creative types will improvise and those who wish to will accept fabrication as fact. The plagiarism war is only one front. Isn’t AI wonderful?
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt
References and Related Reading
Claudine Gay bio, CAPS Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University
Claudine Gay – Scholars at Harvard CV, October 2022
Joanna Basile, Susan Blum Researches the Truth About Plagiarism, College of Arts & Letters, University of Notre Dame, July 19, 2010
Lois Beckett, Ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay warns of ‘a broader war’ in op-ed, The Guardian, January 4, 2024
Ian Bogost, The Plagiarism War Has Begun, The Atlantic, January 4, 2024
William Brangham, Shoshana Dubnow, Ethan Dodd, Harvard remains embroiled in controversy after its president is forced out, PBS NewsHour, January 4, 2024
Hilary Burns, Harvard professors aghast that Claudine Gay resigned without transparent review of plagiarism accusations, Boston Globe, January 6, 2024
Matt Egan, Harvard President Claudine Gay resigns after plagiarism and campus antisemitism accusations, CNN, January 3, 2024
Adam Gabbatt, Media now in Bill Ackman’s sights after wife embroiled in plagiarism row, The Guardian, January 9, 2024
Tyler Austin Harper, The Real Harvard Scandal, The Atlantic, January 3, 2024
Andrew Lawrence, Harvard’s Claudine Gay was ousted for ‘plagiarism’. How serious was it really?, The Guardian, January 6, 2024
Katherine Long, Jack Newsham, Narimes Parakul, Academic celebrity Neri Oxman plagiarized from Wikipedia, scholars, a textbook, and other sources without any attribution, Business Insider, January 5, 2024
Beth McMurtrie, A Brief Guide to How Colleges Adjudicate Plagiarism Cases, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 3, 2024
Amna Nawaz, Brooks and Capehart on the political pressure of the overwhelmed immigration system, PBS NewsHour, December 22, 2023
Tom Nichols, Claudine Gay’s Resignation Was Overdue, The Atlantic, January 2, 2024
Christina Pazzanese, ‘I Love This Place,’ Harvard Gazette, December 15, 2022
Vanessa Romo, Ayana Archie, Claudine Gay's resignation highlights the trouble with regulating academic writing, NPR, January 3, 2024
John S. Rosenberg, A “Scholar’s Scholar,” Harvard Magazine, September-October 2023
Christopher F. Rufo, Christopher Brunet, Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist?, Christopher F. Rufo, December 10, 2023
Michael Schaffer, The Right Is Dancing on Claudine Gay’s Grave. But It Was the Center-Left That Did Her In, Politico, January 4, 2024
Aaron Sibarium, 'This is Definitely Plagiarism': Harvard University President Claudine Gay Copied Entire Paragraphs From Others’ Academic Work and Claimed Them as Her Own, Washington Free Beacon, December 11, 2023
Meredith Wadman, Jocelyn Kaiser, Billionaire launches plagiarism detection effort against MIT president and all its faculty, Science, January 8, 2024
Graeme Wood, Harvard’s Bundy Standard, The Atlantic, January 3, 2024